


Hjordhejmen

by fideliant



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fusion, M/M, Magical Realism
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-05-19
Updated: 2013-05-19
Packaged: 2017-12-12 08:03:57
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,278
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/809250
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fideliant/pseuds/fideliant
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“You’re telling me that you’re a god,” John says bluntly. “An ancient Scandinavian god.”</p><p>The two Sherlocks whom had appeared out of nowhere disappear in a manner that resembles the gritty, wavering flicker of static dissipating when a telly gets switched off. The remaining Sherlock, the original one, nods. “If you fancy the hyperbole, yes.”</p>
            </blockquote>





	Hjordhejmen

**Author's Note:**

  * For [](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts).



> Someone let it slip that they've been craving a spot of god!Lock recently. This is the product.
> 
> Can be looked at as a fusion -- I loosely based the premise of this fic on what I gleamed from the movie _Thor_ , although prior knowledge of that fandom or the Marvel universe is not required.

“You said you had something to tell me,” John says, reclining back in his armchair and nursing a cup of warm tea between his hands. Tea which Sherlock made for him, putting it at utmost dubiousness from the moment Sherlock had offered the cup to John, but after observing Sherlock taking a mouthful and swallowing it down, John’s suspicions have abated somewhat to the point where it merits a taste, at least.

He sips the tea, and is astounded that it’s delicious. Not too sweet, and neither is it drowning in milk, a light-tasting brew with just the right amount of both that John only manages to attain on his best breakfasts. Goes to show that Sherlock can be nice when he decides to be, only it’s a bit of a surprise that he’s this good with hot beverages. Must be all the chemistry he does, John decides, because Sherlock has never once made tea, or coffee, or anything in the kitchen that flows and doesn’t turn human flesh into soup on contact.

Best not to think about that whilst he’s drinking Sherlock’s tea.

Across from John, Sherlock is sitting with one leg angled over the other, fingertips pressed together in front of his pale face. “It is a matter which I believe you should be privy to,” he explains, his expression perfectly neutral. “I’ve been compelled to tell you for quite some time, but you should understand that my brother was quite against it.”

John raises an eyebrow. “Mycroft’s alright with the two of us shagging but this — whatever it is — he’s not alright with me knowing?”

“He wasn’t,” Sherlock corrects.

“Right. So he’s completely agreeable now.”

The corner of Sherlock’s mouth quirks. “Less disagreeable, but he will allow it. I have debated with him on it at length, and I’ve secured his permission to come clean with you.”

“Oh. Well, I just — hang on, since when have you needed Mycroft’s permission for anything, exactly?”

The lift to Sherlock’s lips turns into a smirk that gets the _never_ across plainly enough, but he continues, “The matter is a clandestine one which an agreement prevents from being divulged to any foreign party…apart from the significant others of those involved and — I have reason to believe — a select few in the upper echelons of government.”

John blinks at him. A secret of the level Sherlock is describing isn’t something which he’s sure he really wants to know. Particularly if there’s a chance of being plucked off the streets in a car again or their door being broken down by men in black suits or getting hauled off to secret underground bunkers in the countryside. For the average London-dwelling Englishman, John’s already had more than his fair share of kidnappings on the side as it is, thanks. “Is it absolutely necessary that I know?”

Considering him, Sherlock nods crisply. “We are involved enough such that I know you can be trusted, and furthermore I have no wish to sustain secrets between us. It would be unfair to you if you were not fully aware of what to expect out of our current relationship.”

“Drugs in the coffee, teeth in my cups, the occasional corpse in my bed,” John recites, indicating these things with slight nods. “And the weekly crime scene and the odd shag or two. I think I’ve an idea.” He leaves out any mention of the bullet holes in the walls — they finally got the living room re-plastered and re-papered just the other day without much comment from the contractor, a blessing in itself, and it’s really much too soon to get into another twist over something that’s already had a healthy dose of yelling invested into it.

“This goes higher than all of that,” Sherlock insists.

“And here I thought you broke the mold with Mark and Spencer,” John mutters into his teacup. _Mark Caverly,_ it had said on the toe tag when John had pulled back the covers that day and found a fresh cadaver in his bed with no less than eight leeches stuck to its chest and two where no man ever wants to see a leech clamped to. After getting the body jettisoned back to Bart’s and an evasive explanation at length to Molly regarding _what are those marks,_ John had returned home and found the second body hanging in his closet with ticks the size of peas all over its back like a connect-the-dots puzzle.

 _Spencer Greenwood,_ the tag around its toe had helpfully supplied, just before John had very nearly torn his own hair and had a good mind to do the same to Sherlock.

“I needed a place with optimal laboratory conditions, and you weren’t supposed to be home for the afternoon that day,” Sherlock says without even the barest hint of remorse.

“Well, when you put it like _that,_ of course it becomes completely understandable.”

“Focus,” Sherlock snaps. “Are you going to let me tell you what it is or not?”

Sighing, John lets it go. “What is it?” he asks, and takes another sip of tea.

Without even blinking or allowing for a pause before his answer, Sherlock says, “I am not human.”

The teacup hovers over the dish, stalled in the process of being settled back down. “Come again?” John asks, certain that he did not mishear but any claim as odd as that warrants a second confirmation.

“I am not human,” Sherlock repeats gravely.

“Oh. Erm.” John scrutinises Sherlock’s face and finds no indication that he is lying, although he keeps his flatmate’s proficiency for acting in mind. “I’m afraid I don’t follow.”

Sherlock separates his fingers and lays his hands on the armrests, staring hard at John. His mouth twists around something hard, eyes never once leaving John’s face. “There’s not much else to follow besides what I have just told you,” he says.

“That you’re…not human.”

“Yes.”

“Okay.” The teacup finally meets its dish with a clink and John leans forward to set both on the coffee table. He sits back and folds his arms, not too sure if he wants to humour Sherlock or call out his bluff. “I’ve sort of been guessing at that recently, you know?” he says, vying for the former. “Your diet, and the way you sleep, not to mention you’re brilliant. I kind of get what you mean.”

Sherlock narrows his eyes dangerously. “You don’t believe me.”

“Would you?” John throws out, raising an eyebrow.

This saps away some of the hostility in Sherlock’s eyes. “I suppose not,” he admits, which is a small victory in itself regardless of the context. “From where you are seated, there is no doubt that this must be difficult to process.”

“So we’re just agreeing now that you’re talking crazy,” John says, giving some thought to illegal substances or chemicals in the water, and looks at his teacup with reignited suspicion.

“I am not _talking crazy,_ ” Sherlock replies, sneering the last two words in the tone he usually reserves for demurring some of Anderson’s less flattering qualities. “Seeing as this will go nowhere without any proof to support my claim, it would seem that a demonstration cannot be avoided. Observe closely.”

“What’re you —” John manages, and then there are suddenly three Sherlocks drilling into him with their combined gazes. Two have materialised out of thin air and are flanking the one seated in Sherlock’s chair, who hasn’t so much as moved a muscle from where he is. The Sherlock lookalikes lift their chins at the exact same moment and stare down their noses at John. Out of sheer instinct, John pulls his gaze back to the quarter-full teacup sitting innocently on the coffee table and wonders if it’s too late to make it to his charcoal pills.

“There was nothing in your tea,” the Sherlock on the chair assures him.

“You aren’t hallucinating,” the one on his right adds.

“What you are seeing is real,” the last one finishes. “Well, in the strictest sense of the word. Illusions aren’t actually tangible.”

“There’s three of you,” John mumbles, looking at all of them and yes, they’re all Sherlock as far as he can tell from the thick, curly hair down to the expensive shoes. He closes his eyes and counts to ten, but he there are still two extra Sherlocks when he opens them and looks again. Ruling out hallucinogenics, the doctor part of his mind skips ahead to the next most likely diagnosis. “Christ. Tell me I’m not crazy.”

“You’re not crazy,” chair-Sherlock says. “Any normal person would be experiencing the same thing, or any other member of my kind would for that matter.”

“When you say _your kind,_ ” John interrupts weakly.

Three sets of gloating smiles find their way to the Sherlocks’ lips. “As I said. I’m afraid that if it were your attempt to classify me according to the binomial nomenclature of this world, you would be unable to come to a conclusive classification without creating an entirely new one of its own.”

It takes a few seconds of recalling everything he knows of A-Level biology before John realises that none of it helps in the slightest with answering any of the questions he has for Sherlock ( _Sherlocks?_ There are bloody three of them now). “If you’re not human,” he says slowly, allowing for the ‘if’, “then what are you?”

Chair-Sherlock sniffs. “There is no scientific word for my species, but I believe that we’ve been called Asgardians by mankind for as long as they have presupposed our existence.”

“Asgardians?” The term sounds oddly familiar for reasons that John can’t place.

“The Norsemen were the first to title us in that fashion when we first visited Earth, the root word stemming from the realm which our kind inhabits. It just ended up sticking after a while despite the homophonic connotations.”

“You’re telling me that you’re a god,” John says bluntly. “An ancient Scandinavian god.”

The two Sherlocks whom had appeared out of nowhere disappear in a manner that resembles the gritty, wavering flicker of static dissipating when a telly gets switched off. The remaining Sherlock, the original one, nods. “If you fancy the hyperbole, yes.”

Quite frankly, John doesn’t know what he fancies at the moment. “You’re not joking with me, are you?”

Sherlock returns his hands to an inverted V in front of his face. “I’m quite serious, I’m afraid. I could make a dozen clones of myself, if that will convince you.” He waves a hand, and eleven other Sherlocks troupe in from the kitchen, disappearing when they come to stand behind the Sherlock on the chair.

“What,” John breathes.

“Believe me now?”

“I’m not dreaming, am I?”

“Not any more than you’re crazy.”

Those aren’t reassuring odds. John’s mind works for a while, going back on the knowledge he retains of mythology that has been scarred by memory and bad telly. “You don’t look like a god,” he says lamely.

“We’re humanoid, and our physiology closely resembles that of human beings for the most part, which lets us blend in when we choose to visit this world or live in it for extended periods of time, as my family has for generations. The rest is merely a matter of adequate disguise. Appearance alteration is an elementary skill in Asgardian magic.”

“You’re a god _and_ a sorcerer,” John says incredulously.

“Hyperbole,” Sherlock reminds him. “Conventional definition by mankind would fit us into either category, but I would prefer it if you used the term _Asgardian._ ”

John remains quiet, just looking at Sherlock. Then, he rubs his face and murmurs, “I think I need some more tea.”

After Sherlock has come back from the kitchen and made a show of tasting the tea first before handing it to John, he lowers himself back into his chair and says, “Do you believe me, now?”

Sipping the tea, John frowns. “Do something else. The thing with the clones could just be smoke and mirrors.”

“Any requests?” Sherlock asks. “I can read your mind if you want me to.”

“I think you do enough of that already.”

“Telekinesis?” The coffee table levitates a foot off the floor and comes back down with a soft thud. “Changing the weather?” Sherlock waves a hand at the window and the sunny afternoon outside immediately becomes overcast with grey in a few seconds before clearing up again. “Or you can shoot me if you want, I won’t be harmed, I promise.”

“No need to overdo things,” John says, alarmed. “I guess there’s no reason not to believe you. Unless if you really have been drugging me and all of this is just an elaborate hallucination.”

“For the last time —”

“Yes, alright then,” John says quickly. Then, to steer the conversation forward, he says, “So, um. What else can you do? Apart from the cloning trick and…all of that.”

“My maximum strength allows me to lift up to thirty metric tonnes of mass unassisted.”

John boggles at Sherlock.

“Magic is another aspect which few excel at past the basics, but as I am now with my level of aptitude, I can manifest enough inert energy in the atmosphere and excite it sufficiently to create the equivalent of a military-grade bomb.”

John is starting to become very, very thankful he has tea to tide him over the revelation that his boyfriend can blow things up with his mind. “And…and Mycroft’s the same?”

Sherlock immediately looks as though he’s just ingested a whole pack of sour candies. “Mycroft cheats. He derives unnaturally powerful magic from contact with a physical medium rather than his own capacity.”

“Physical medium?”

Sherlock’s eyebrow accuses John of being particularly thick, although it often does little else. “No one has such deliberately horrible taste in umbrellas,” he explains. “Asgardian weapons are forged unique to their owners and typically imbue them with amplified magical abilities.”

“Ah.” John still doesn’t quite understand, but stops at clarifying further. “If you’re a god, does that mean you’re all-powerful?”

“That’s ridiculous,” Sherlock says, rolling his eyes. “A being can be powerful to a certain degree, but the idea of limitless energy being exercised trans-dimensionally across time and space is absurd even for the most experienced of Asgardian magic practitioners. I could destroy or build up an entire country with my magic, yes, but the effort would probably kill me and then some.”

It’s not the kind of relief that John thinks he should be feeling, but he takes it anyway in place of whatever the hell any normal person would harbour. Goes to show how much exactly he’s adjusted to living around Sherlock in the time they’ve been together. “Okay. Fair enough,” he finds himself saying. “What about immortality? Do you live forever, like an actual god?”

This question is followed by a stretch of silence before Sherlock replies with, “Lifespan-wise, the typical Asgardian is practically ageless. If nothing untoward happens, it is likely that I will live for millennia to come.”

“Oh.” The immediate question that succeeds the last is one that neither of them say out loud, but it hangs in the silence.

“Yes, I will outlive you, just as I outlived far too many people to name,” Sherlock says, with just a touch of (John wants to say _sadness,_ but he thinks he knows better than that) emotion in his voice.

“Far too many people…?” Completely outside John’s volition, he realises with a start that having an infinite lifespan does in fact translate to the possibility of infinite relationships.

“I didn’t mean it like that,” Sherlock interjects swiftly, waving a hand. Goodness, was he really reading John’s mind? “I…I must confess that for as long as I have lived on Earth, I was never once romantically involved, much less sexually. Until now, of course, which is why I’ve never told anyone.”

“Never?”

“Not in a thousand years. Which is an expression, just to be clear. It’s not an actual indication of my age; I’m quite possibly as old as seven thousand Earth-years.”

Despite himself, John laughs. “You don’t remember how old you are?”

“What does age matter if I don’t die?” Sherlock replies crossly. “I deleted that a long time ago. It’s a wonder I can still provide you with a rough estimate.”

“It’s a wonder that this is even happening.” John drains the tea and sighs with warm breath, setting the cup and saucer aside. Something occurs to him. “Just out of curiosity, what would you have done if you didn’t tell me any of this?”

Sherlock seems to think about this for a while. “Same as I always have. Assuming that we enter a civil partnership, I would ensorcel my appearance to reflect the progression of human ageing so long as we live together, you would die before me, and then I’d start all over again in my next life. But as I said, it wouldn’t be fair to keep you in the dark about this.”

“Assuming.”

“Yes.”

“You say that like there’s a chance it won’t happen.”

“I did just confess to being a supernatural being,” Sherlock says, throwing his hands in the air. “At least now you can make an informed choice if you want to leave me or stay. I’ll understand if you go, I honestly do, but it’s my hope that you’ll stay even after all of this. We can go on like we always have, I’m quite good at being human, if you’ve noticed, or rather you haven’t, which I suppose is the point I’m trying to get across.”

John looks at Sherlock, another laugh bubbling up his throat. It’s comical, really, the way Sherlock sees things sometimes. You’d think a couple thousand years would give a person the slightest bit of perspective. “You store human remains all over our flat and you’re scared I’m going to leave because you’re suddenly a Norse god of some sort? Jesus, Sherlock.”

Staring back at John, Sherlock’s eyes threaten to pop out of his head. “You mean it? You’re not going to leave?”

The laugh finally escapes John, much brighter than the last. “A bit late for that now, don’t you think? If anything, I suppose it’s a lot more reassuring for me now that I know you’re not going to starve to death even if you tried to, although we are still going to have to talk about your diet some more. And what you get up to with your body, because even if you’re not human, you sure as hell look like one. But you do make great tea for a god.”

“You’re serious? About the staying, I mean.”

“And the rest of it,” John confirms. “Not to mention that I am sort of mad for you.”

Sherlock leaps out of his chair and strides over in one large step to lift John out of his chair as though John weighs nothing, then brands him with a kiss that has John gasping and begging to be set back down again.

“Sorry,” Sherlock says once John is back in his chair.

Grasping his ribs, John heaves a breath in and out. “You weren’t kidding about the thirty tonnes bit.”

“I made thirty-five once,” Sherlock informs him happily. “But it was a long time ago and I haven’t come into the need to lift anything as heavy since. It’s possible that I’ve grown weaker.”

“Well, if we ever need to get a jumbo jet off a person at any point in our lives…”

“My brother’s sexual life is none of our concern.” Sherlock grins wickedly.

“You’re terrible,” John says half-heartedly, but does reach up and bring Sherlock down again by the collar of his shirt for another kiss.


End file.
